A “big data” approach to studying parliamentary scrutiny

I have a new article out in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations: In Search of the Politics of Security. In it, I take what could be called a big data approach to the study of parliamentary scrutiny, by scraping information on the passage of legislation from the UK parliament’s website. The website’s current incarnation is relatively recent and there isn’t that much legislation passed every year so I was only able to scrape information on around 150 successfully passed bills. However the information which does come out is quite rich – all recorded votes, amount of time it took to pass the legislation, links to debates and committee hearings, etc. So I still think of it as a kind of big data approach.

My question was pretty simple: does the UK parliament offer less scrutiny on legislation which relates to crime and national security? This emerges from my interest in securitization theory and security politics, which I must admit I have recently been drifting away from slightly (as the war on terror has died down I also think it is becoming slightly less relevant). The project started off as an attempt to measure the scale of this difference, based on what I perceive as a quite widespread assumption that legislators essentially roll over when the government wants to toughen up crime or security law. In the end however I found a relationship in the other direction – such legislation seems to get more attention and scrutiny. It’s a smallish dataset and a limited time period so the conclusions aren’t hard and fast, nevertheless I think it’s a bit of a challenge to the way security politics is often conceptualised.